I admit that from time to time I’m a bit too lazy to follow every claim through all of its weird permutations. When Graham Hancock claimed in Magicians of the Gods that extinct Ice Age megafauna (specifically mammoths and toxodons) supposedly appear on the Gateway of the Sun at Tiwanaku (Tiahuanaco) in Bolivia, it was enough for me to remember that he had made that claim in Fingerprints of the Gods twenty years earlier and had based it on Arthur Posnansky’s 1945 book on Tiahuanaco: Cradle of American Man to show how little originality goes into a Hancock book. What I didn’t know is that Posnansky’s observation apparently led to a famous French scholar to adduce that the Gateway of the Sun is evidence for Nephilim in Atlantis!

So, the short form of the background is that the Gateway of the Sun is a megalithic gate carved with a series of stylized figures usually identified as birds. Posnansky, however, imagined them to be toxodons, an extinct Ice Age mammal, and thus concluded that the gate dated back to the Ice Age. As I was reading through Andrew Tomas’s We Are Not the First, I found a reference to the same claim, but attributed to someone else entirely: “However, Professor Denis Saurat of France has identified the heads of animals in the calendar of Tiahuanaco in South America as those of toxodons, prehistoric animals which lived in the Tertiary period, many millions of years ago.” (The toxodon lived from 2.6 million to 16,500 years ago.) The footnote specifies that Saurat made the claim in Atlantis and the Giants.

It turns out that Atlantis and the Giants is the 1957 English edition of the 1954 book L’Atlantide et le règne des géants. It turns out that this book reads like a weird combination of Theosophy, Immanuel Velikovsky, Ignatius Donnelly, and the Nephilim, despite the fact that Saurat wasn’t familiar with Velikovsky. Instead, it takes its origins from the World Ice Theory of Hans Hörbiger as interpreted by H. S. Bellamy. This was the catastrophist idea of geology favored by the Nazis. Bellamy’s version specifically related the fall of Atlantis and the civilization of Tiwanaku to the destructive power of the giant chunks of ice that wandered the solar system, as well as the three moons he believes preceded our own. The World Ice Theory was the official cosmology of National Socialism because it was in opposition to the “Jewish” theory of relativity, and despite its manifest lack of factual basis it maintained a shadow existence among a subset of European intellectuals and publishers through the middle twentieth century.

Atlantis and the Giants centers on the reign of the Giants, which Saurat takes to be the older and more powerful race of humans who preceded us. They lived on the standard lost continents like Atlantis and Mu, and the previous ice-covered moon that once orbited the Earth was responsible for destroying their civilization when it crashed into the Earth. This (but of course) was remembered only in myth and legend, and preserved, as the author notes, in Genesis 6:4, the famous passage about the Nephilim, who were destroyed in the Flood. Saurat places a great deal of weight on Tiwanaku because he takes the eight-foot tall stone idols there to be life-size representations of the Giants, and he repeats the standard fringe history claims about how the large stones used to build it and nearby Puma Punku could have been moved, though he answer the question with “Giants” rather than “aliens.” Like other fringe figures, he agrees that Tiwanaku was once a coastal capital. You see, one of the ice-moons was once quite close to the Earth, and its gravity lifted the tides up to 13,000 feet, until the ice-moon fell apart and left Atlantis (Tiwanaku) stranded.

He also claims that “Atlantis” and its outposts contained such large buildings because during the last era of any given moon, the change in gravity as it spirals toward the earth allows humans and animals to grow to enormous sizes due to gravitational acceleration being only about 5 m/s instead of the current 9.8 m/s. This works in combination with what he says are powerful “cosmic rays” that once bathed the earth in life-giving radiation. (Hey, it was the Atom Age!) Oh, and during the interregnum between moons the lack of lunar gravity counterbalancing Earth gravity promotes dwarves and elves due to stronger pull from the Earth. (Yes, I know this doesn’t make a lot of sense.) But wait, there’s more! The last giants, after the crash of the Third Moon, became degenerate and cannibalistic, and scared modern humans worshiped them and sacrificed to them to stay safe from the monsters they mistook for “gods.”

All in all, Saurat’s 1954 book seems to bear the closest resemblance to the even more influential French book Morning of the Magicians from four years later. After all, the authors of Morning, Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels, mention Saurat by name, only a paragraph or so before discussing the World Ice Theory, so it’s clear they were familiar with his work and used it in preparing their own. If nothing else, there is a strange confluence of occult Nazism, catastrophism, and lost civilizations in both books, though the authors of Morning substituted aliens for giants. Perhaps the idea of gravity-induced cannibal giants was too implausible even for them!

Ancient legends from the 1970s onward speak of a race of giants who inhabited North America. The oldest and best-attested is of course the green giant, who was feared widely, and in an effort to stop the green giant, the people of North America called up new giants, a female, a red giant, a gray giant, and a blue giant. Legends even speak of a "man of iron" who sometimes fought alongside and sometimes fought against the giants.

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Shane Sullivan

12/4/2015 05:39:25 pm

There was another green giant, too, but he was known less for his temper and more for his peas.

Ph

12/4/2015 06:01:02 pm

Please ignore my non nativeness with the american english language, but what do you mean with "Ancient legends from the 1970s onward speak of"?

Are you saying some legends from post 1970 are ancient?
Are you saying that the Ancient legends changed their 'speak of' from 1970 onward?
I'm guessing i am missing a third interpretation, as the above 2 just confuzzle the gehenna out of me.

Please enlighten me.

Ph

12/4/2015 06:05:56 pm

Nevermind, it just took me a long time to get the entire analogy.
Nicely done.

An Over-Educated Grunt

12/5/2015 02:12:53 pm

Oh, it's all Marvel references. They're the increasingly silly Hulks. They are at least as well documented as mammoths at Tiwanaku.

Pam

12/4/2015 02:31:06 pm

"Saurat places a great deal of weight on Tiwanaku because he takes the eight-foot tall stone idols there to be life-size representations of the Giants,..."

Why does it never occur to the giant promoters that people of the past would make really big statues of admired leaders? All over Europe and America there are really big statues of guys we honor in history (Lincoln Memorial comes to mind).

We use terms today like "giants of industry, science, etc. Why can't Nephilim have the same function?

To be honest, the measurements came from the description from the book. I don't think the idols are actually that tall, but I didn't check their actual height.

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V

12/6/2015 12:08:25 am

You are correct, Pam. Hierarchical scale is a real thing, where size is used to represent importance rather than physical actuality, throughout most art in the world. Even modern movie-making does the same thing; witness the huge "size" of gods in many a movie and even in cartoons like the Simpsons.

People who do not know this are pig ignorant, to be honest. Which does include these giant-hunter types.

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Bob Jase

12/4/2015 02:50:52 pm

How is it the the only source for the story of Atlantis, Plato, is so ignorant about the giants and ultra-tech that subsequent Atlanitis believers propose?

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Mike Jones

12/4/2015 05:12:27 pm

One of the monuments at Tiahuanaco, the Bennett Monolith, is over 23 ft. tall. Another, The Friar [ "El Fraile"] , I believe, is in the 9ft. range.

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Mike Jones

12/4/2015 05:22:32 pm

The third one, the "Ponce Monolith" is 11 ft.

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Mike Jones

12/4/2015 05:42:39 pm

I just looked closely at images of the Gate of the Sun. The figures are clearly two types of man and bird combo . How the hell Posnansky got toxodon is beyond me.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_of_the_Sun#/media/File:Centro_de_la_puerta_1903-1904.jpg

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Will

12/5/2015 08:58:02 am

I did the same thing! They are totally birds. If Posansky was hell bent on interpreting it as some ancient extinct animal, he should have at least looked for one that looked somewhat like a bird.

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Kathleen Smith

12/5/2015 09:18:02 am

Archaeopteryx, perhaps

Uncle Ron

12/5/2015 07:37:34 pm

If you look at the second row of figures you can imagine an elephant's trunk coming down the right side of each image. The nostrils are in the vertical bars dividing the images. The wing looks like an ear.
I agree that it's a bird, but if you try you can find an elephant there. The other images are definitely birds.

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Will

12/5/2015 07:59:26 pm

Uncle Ron -- I can see that interpretation, but I don't think toxodons had trunks.

ANON

12/7/2015 06:05:18 pm

do Lemuria and Mu predate Blavatsky's writings ?

i read the entirety of isis unveiled and the secret doctrine years ago, but can't remember much about it apart from the queasy, disoriented feeling i got from the endeavour.

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